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Here's A Three-Year-Old Breastfeeding On Time Magazine Cover

Jen Chung

Published May 10, 2012

Modified May 10, 2012

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Jen Chung

Published May 10, 2012

Modified May 10, 2012

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We've known that attachment parenting has become trendy. The practice encourages parents to closely bond with children by wearing slings (instead of putting them in bouncers), co-sleeping (versus putting the kid in a crib) and breastfeeding until the child is ready for college—and even Blossom has written a book about it. But now Time Magazine is jumping into the bourgie parenting debate with a cover featuring a three-year-old boy suckling on his 26-year-old mother's breast. Suck it, Newsweek's rape fantasy cover!

Time's cover piece is mainly about the guru of attachment parenting, Dr. William Sears, the avuncular pediatrician whose The Baby Book is a go-to for many new parents. Sears—and his wife Martha—have been promoting attachment parenting for decades, and how women have embraced it... or not:

Mothers seem divided into several camps. Some, like Joanne Beauregard, fully commit to the Sears model, attend to every whimper, stay home and happily cuddle their babies 24 hours a day. Sears has become a hero to this set. Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year-old mother of two in Los Angeles who breast-feeds her 3-year-old son, says of Sears, "He has a very gentle spirit, and I find what he's saying to be nonjudgmental and relevant." Other mothers — particularly those who work or have multiple children — endorse the idea of maternal closeness (who doesn't?) but think Sears is out of his mind. Modern parenting literature, after all, is full of advice about getting babies on manageable schedules, a Sears no-no, and baby stores are brimming with devices in which parents can park their babies to get much needed breaks.

A third category includes mothers caught in the middle. These parents try to achieve Sears' ideal of nursing, baby wearing and co-sleeping but fall short for some reason and find themselves immobilized by their seeming parental inadequacy. They suffer from what two New York City parenting consultants call "posttraumatic Sears disorder."

Maybe these parents just take Sears too literally. "When somebody says attachment parenting, what comes into my mind is a mother with a newborn on one hip, a 2-year-old on the other hip and a 3-year-old on her back. And she hasn't taken a shower in a week and a half," says Jim Sears, the Searses' oldest son. "My parents really didn't do that, even though a lot of their readers ended up doing that."

It's also questionable whether Sears supports working mothers. Sears, who is evangelical, wrote an evangelical version of the book, The Complete Book of Christian Parenting & Child Care, which has a chapter, "Going Back to Work?" that says, "[Some] mothers choose to go back to their jobs quickly simply because they don't understand how disruptive that is to the well-being of their babies. So many babies in our culture are not being cared for in the way God designed, and we as a nation are paying the price."

Sears tells Time that his thinking has evolved since then, but the magazine reports, "the Searses also suggest mothers quit their jobs and borrow money to make up the difference. The couple subsidized their sons' wives so they could stay home with the Sears grandchildren." So he's like Mitt Romney's dad?

Grumet, the mother shown on the cover (who is also a "mommy blogger"), has a Q&A with Time, explaining that she was breastfed until she was six ("It's really warm... You feel comforted, nurtured and really, really loved. I had so much self-confidence as a child") and that she also breastfed her adopted son, which helped with bonding. As for people who might be critical of her approach:

They are people who tell me they’re going to call social services on me or that it’s child molestation. I really don’t think I can reason with those people. But as far as someone who says they’re uncomfortable with this, I don’t think it’s wrong to admit this. But people have to realize this is biologically normal. It’s not socially normal. The more people see it, the more it’ll become normal in our culture. That’s what I’m hoping. I want people to see it.

There seems to be a war going on between conventional parenting and attachment parenting, and that’s what I want to avoid. I want everyone to be encouraging. We’re not on opposing teams. We all need to be encouraging to each other, and I don’t think we’re doing a very good job at that.

Tagged

attachment parenting

bonding

breastfeeding

dr william sears

working mothers

Jen Chung

Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.

Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations

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